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Los Angeles City Beat
August 14-20, 2003
STOKED: THE RISE AND FALL OF GATOR
By Andrew John Ignatius Vontz
In an era when skateboarding is more popular than baseball and the average mom in the Midwest knows who Tony Hawk is—and that his signature move is the 900—it’s sometimes difficult to remember that a little more than a decade ago skateboarding was consummately uncool and seemingly on the verge of cultural extinction. During the early ’90s, Before the X-Games were a televisual institution and Mr. Hawk’s line of clothing was available in more than 200 stores in California and thousands more across the country, skateboarding was in a severe economic slump and in the midst of an identity crisis that had brutal consequences for the industry and some of the star skaters of the era.
In her powerful, disturbing documentary Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, first time filmmaker Helen Stickler masterfully limns the cultural, economic, and imagistic forces informing the trajectory of the sport during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as embodied in the story of the skater most emblematic of the era, Mark Gator Rogowski. After becoming the most financially successful and popular skateboarder of the mid to late ‘80s by virtue of his violent party boy image, smooth vert skating, and the marketing blitz he helped design and implement for Vision skateboards and Vision Street Wear, the focus of the sport shifted to street skating, a métier Gator could not master.
In short order the bipolar Gator lost his skate betty girlfriend Brandi McClain, descended into a deep depression, and became a born-again Christian that proselytized to young skaters at every opportunity—odd behavior for a dude who had cemented his reputation as a badass by punching a cop at the Mt. Trashmore skate contest in 1986. The rage that had long simmered beneath Gator’s cocky facade soon manifested itself in a most grotesque, brutal, and tragic manner in 1991 when Gator invited McClain’s former friend 21-year-old Jessica Bergston to his condo in San Diego where he beat her head with a Club steering wheel locking device, handcuffed and raped her, then threw her in a surfboard bag and suffocated her because he was afraid neighbors would hear her desperate cries. The next evening, Gator drove Bergston’s body to the desert and buried her before confessing to the crime a short time later then denying it then reversing himself again in an attempt to avert the death penalty that resulted in a 31-year prison sentence that he is serving today.
To tell Gator’s story, Stickler relies on phone interviews with Gator from prison, interviews with his pro skater and industry peers, interviews with the team of law enforcement officials who investigated the case, and classic skate footage from the era.
“I’ve been around skating a long time myself,” says Stickler, an Emmy-nominated writer and director who began work on the project in 1997 while directing commercials for MTV. “The Gator story was a big urban legend in that community because there wasn’t a lot of information about it. Thrasher wrote one deliberately ambiguous column, Hard Copy covered it, and there was one story in the Village Voice. Nobody had a handle on what happened. I was curious how someone who was a role model to kids got in the position where he could commit such a desperate act.”
Dogtown and Z-Boys successfully chronicled the First Great Skate Awakening and ESPN and the plethora of skate videos that have flooded the market since 1993 have provided an insta-history of every moment in the sport’s last decade, but before Stoked, the period between these two skate epochs hadn’t been explored in any depth. Using Gator’s story as a touchstone, Stoked provides a thorough, in-depth history of the watershed moments of skateboarding’s Second Great Awakening.
By virtue of the technology and skate culture mores of the period between the early and late ‘80s, park, pool, and vert ramp skating—Gator’s areas of proficiency—were the sport’s focus. Visually spectacular and dependent on costly, human-built perfect transitions rendered in concrete, plywood, and masonite, this iteration of the sport was accessible only to those with the money or luck to have access to the right terrain.
As skateboarding became more mainstream, top young skaters such as Powell Peralta’s Bones Brigade (Tony Hawk, Tommy Guerrero, Steve Cabellero, Mike McGill, and Lance Mountain), Mark Gonzales, and Gator became famous and reaped the substantial financial rewards of the sport’s popularity through board sales and product endorsements. It looked like skateboarding had transcended trend status and was well on its way to becoming a national past time in America and a right of passage for youths around the globe. Video played a crucial role in skateboarding’s rising popularity during this period.
“One of the things that fascinates me about skateboarding is the media structure,” says Stickler, who has written extensively on the topic. “If you don’t shoot it or photograph it or film it, did the tree fall in the forest?”
The proliferation of skate videos that hit the market during the ‘80s had an inestimable impact on the sport for two reasons. These videos allowed skaters across America to scrutinize the moves of top skaters over and over and then take what they’d learned to the local ramps thus greatly accelerating the velocity of innovation and progression in the sport. Simultaneously, video made image building, brand identity, and self-promotion qualities as essential to success in the pro skating marketplace as a deep bag of tricks. As Stickler persuasively demonstrates, no one played the image game better than Gator who successfully leveraged a renegade, outlaw image into huge board sales that made Vision skateboards and their line of Vision Street Wear apparel the sport’s dominant tastemakers.
But during the early ‘90s the major players in the skate industry from the ‘80s including Vision had become so corporatized and cheesy that they’d alienated their core customers. The Del Mar Skate Ranch and Upland Pipeline, the two skateparks that were skating’s epicenter during the mid-‘80s were closed and destroyed in 1987 and 1988 respectively which physically and symbolically prefigured the demise of vert skating as the dominant skating discipline several years later.
During the early ‘90s, the more readily accessible form of street skating rose to prominence and skating lost its mainstream appeal. The hardcore skaters who stuck with the sport wanted nothing to do with Vision and the other big companies that they perceived as having sold out and ruined their sport. In their stead, a new breed of skater-owned companies such as Tony Magnusson’s H-Street and Steve Rocco’s Santa Monica Airlines that catered to new school street skaters rose up, dominated the market, and buried the old school giants.
Unfortunately for Gator, he had been so successful at branding himself as the mainstream posterboy of ‘80s skating that when the sport changed, it was an image he couldn’t shake. It didn’t help matters that his street skating flat out sucked as proven by a particularly unflattering piece of footage in Stoked that shows Gator failing to land an ollie over a curb, an extremely basic streetskating move. The adulation, praise, and affirmation that Gator had come to expect from his peers, fans, and the industry that he had helped to build were nowhere to be found. No one wanted Gator—including Gator—and soon he spiraled downward into a depression that resulted in murder.
The skate boom of the mid-‘90s that has continued into the current decade has minted a new generation of stuntwood millionaires dripping with platinum and diamonds who roll in dub-equipped Escalade’s and Mercedes G-500’s when they’re not skating. Given that the money making lifespan of the average pro skater in the modern era is roughly equivalent to that of a porn star and that the industry is again in decline, albeit a much less severe decline than it was in the early ‘90s, Stoked might also play a valuable role in modern skate history as a public service announcement of sorts.
“I think there are kids out there who are just as arrogant and short sighted as Gator,” says Stickler who is quick to note that the severity of Gator’s downfall was exacerbated by his mental illness in a pre-Prozac era. “When I interviewed Lance Mountain he said he thought it was worse now because there are more pros. With any sport where kids are getting a lot of money and stuff, there’s potential for problems.”
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